OceanPark

3-28-05 Magnitude 8.7 earthquake in Indonesia

Magnitude 8.7 - NORTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA
2005 March 28 16:09:36 UTC

Preliminary Earthquake Report
U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center
World Data Center for Seismology, Denver

Magnitude	8.7
Date-Time	Monday, March 28, 2005 at 16:09:36 (UTC) = Coordinated Universal Time Monday, March 28, 2005 at 11:09:36 PM = local time at epicenter Monday, March 28, 2005 at 08:09:36 AM (PST) A great earthquake occurred at 16:09:36 (UTC) on Monday, March 28, 2005. The magnitude 8.7 event has been located in NORTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA. (This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.)
Location	2.065°N, 97.010°E
Depth	30 km (18.6 miles) set by location program
Region	NORTHERN SUMATRA, INDONESIA
Distances	205 km (125 miles) WNW of Sibolga, Sumatra, Indonesia 250 km (155 miles) SW of Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia 535 km (330 miles) WSW of KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia 1410 km (880 miles) NW of JAKARTA, Java, Indonesia
Location Uncertainty	horizontal +/- 4.6 km (2.9 miles); depth fixed by location program
Parameters	Nst=239, Nph=239, Dmin=538.5 km, Rmss=0.79 sec, Gp= 25°, M-type=moment magnitude (Mw), Version=9
Source	USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Event ID	usweax
Felt Reports	At least 290 people killed, 100 injured and 300 houses destroyed on Nias. Extensive damage on Simeulue. Felt in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and as far north as Bangkok, Thailand.

Event follows two strong earthquakes of magnitudes 6.5 and 6.7 at Sulawesi, Indonesia and at Simeulue, Indonesia on Feb. 19 and Feb. 26.  A magnitude 9.0 was recorded off of the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia on Dec. 26.

3-26-05 Dirty Laundry

I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry

Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry

Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em all around

We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you ’bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
It’s interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry

Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a
Running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry

You don’t really need to find out what’s going on
You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry

Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down

Kick ’em when they’re up
Kick ’em when they’re down
Kick ’em when they’re stiff
Kick ’em all around

Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody’s pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry

We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!

--don henley, 1982, 'I Cant Stand Still' album, Elektra Records (now Atlantic)

3-22-05 A Pretty Good Little Jolt

Let's see if that was an earthquake just now. Either that or the abandoned school on the hill above us is about to slide down on top of us.

Yep! Pretty small, actually, but very close by, just down the beach from us.

Magnitude	3.4 - local magnitude (ML)
Time	Tuesday, March 22, 2005 at 4:07:06 PM (PST) Wednesday, March 23, 2005 at 0:07:06 (UTC)
Distance from	Manhattan Beach, CA - 6 km (4 miles) W (261 degrees) Hermosa Beach, CA - 7 km (4 miles) WNW (284 degrees) El Segundo, CA - 7 km (5 miles) SW (232 degrees) Torrance, CA - 13 km (8 miles) WNW (293 degrees) Los Angeles Civic Center, CA - 28 km (18 miles) SW (227 degrees)
Coordinates	33 deg. 52.8 min. N (33.880N), 118 deg. 28.2 min. W (118.469W)
Depth	2.1 km (1.3 miles)
Location Quality	Fair
Location Quality Parameters	Nst=103, Nph=103, Dmin=9 km, Rmss=0.54 sec, Erho=0.5 km, Erzz=0.7 km, Gp=54 degrees
Event ID#	ci14133232 SOURCE: U.S. Geological Survey; Earthquake Hazards Program - Southern California

3-21-05 Dumb Shit You Do When You're Sick

#1. Missing time.

My inspiration is the Honey Bear. How sick have I been? Four 12 oz. Honey Bear's worth. Number four just bit the dust, and I was just sitting here, for God knows how many minutes exactly, holding the inverted Honey Bear bottle over my cup of tea, hoping that I could gather enough agonizingly slow droplets for decent flavor. I'm beginning to think that most people who claim to be UFO abductees are just people with really bad head colds.

#2. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Pouring boiling water into plastic Honey Bear #3 to melt the crystalized shards at the bottom of the bottle. Honey Bears are almost always made of plastic. Really bad idea.

#4. Driving.

Anywhere, anytime when you are full of antibiotics, corticosteroids, and prescription strength codeine-laced cough syrup.

#3. Forgeting to ask your brain to call you now and then to let you know where it's gone and when it might be coming back.

'Cause you apparently can't count to ten without hints.

#5. Dropping out of sight.

I have been to the office twice in the past two weeks. Haven't seen my trainer, my shrink, my accupuncture doctor, friends, masseuse, etc. etc. Haven't really talked to any of them much either.

#6. Melted the teapot.

Okay, so the pot itself didn't melt, just the cute little green plastic ball on the lid, which sort of oozed down and wound up looking like an old-fashioned wax letter seal. The stainless steel pot just changed to a neat pewter color.

#7. Missing Time, part deux, or It seemed like a good idea at the time, part deux.

Pouring cold water on a teapot that has been heated to blast furnace forge temperatures on your stove.

#8. It was either that or my shirt.

You haven't lived until you are so desperate to blow your nose that you turn to the used Mickey Dee's napkin you found wedged between the car seats.

3-15-05 Distributed Computing Statistics

My SETI stats

Your credit:
Name (and URL)	Raven at the Yahoo-SETI-Club-Team
Results Received	18002
Total CPU Time	9.139 years
Average CPU Time per work unit	4 hr 26 min 49.7 sec
Average results received per day	8.90
Last result returned:	Tue Mar 15 20:28:34 2005 UTC
Registered on:	Thu Sep 2 03:23:37 1999 UTC
	View Registration Class
SETI@home user for:	5.539 years
	View User Profile
Your group info:
You belong to the group named:	Yahoo SETI Club Team
You are not currently the founder of any teams.
Your rank: (based on current workunits received)
Your rank out of 5378044 total users is:	11395th place.
The number of users who have this rank:	1
You have completed more work units than	99.788% of our users.

Climateprediction.net Account statistics
climateprediction.net member since	12 Feb 2005 17:39:13 UTC
Total credit	24858.10
equivalent HadSM3 Model-Years	164.41
Recent average credit	844.00
Team	Ars  Technica - Team Baked Alaska*

*#16 of 158 team members in Recent Average Credit; #37 in Total Credit as Raven5655.

3-14-05 (technically, there are four minutes to go) I hate being sick

I am apparently done with sleep for at least awhile. Understandable, I guess, since I was nodding off at my desk at home at 7:33 p.m. and decided to go to bed. I did get in some Xbox time with my four-year-old son, Julian, who seemed particularly happy to see me tonight. Thrilled, in fact, to have daddy home.

God, there is no kind of love like this. Better than the love of a girlfriend, which, if you are lucky, maybe lasts once or twice in your life. Better than the love of a spouse, at least here, because my spouse depends on me for just about everything and so I am constantly worried about living up to that. This is even better than pet love, which is always wildly enthusiastic and unadulterated no matter what kind of skanky condition you happen to be in. But, let's face it, the pet is about as smart as lint and maybe not such a good judge of character.

The love of your child is better than all of that because your child does have a brain like a sponge and can already make choices and decisions about who he likes and dislikes.

(Painful segue here, but hold on while the g-forces hit because I am still on point.)

In most electronic games, you can hack your way into something called God-mode. Better yet, you can usually find someone online who has developed a ready made hack that you can just type into the code or install from a zipfile. It's always fun to go into God-mode for awhile, especially if life is throwing you some high hard ones inside and brushing you back off the plate. In God-mode, you are impervious. You are invulnerable. The Big Unstoppable, in the words of Shaquille O'Neal. In other words, everything you can't be in real life.

I am at the God-mode stage with my son, where he looks at me as if I'm the Big Unstoppable. Accomplisher of all things Important, like fixing his toy or being able to find the pick from his guitar or always watching at just the right moment when he has figured out a new skateboard trick on his XBox game.

I love God-mode. I love my son.

Unfortunately, I am sick. It's like God-mode in reverse. And the following, for me, is unheard of. I have been sick for nine days and now it is doing that awful morphing thing that illnesses sometimes do these days, which is to shapeshift into some other frigging malady. So, I have left behind last week's ridiculously sore throat and headaches and bad stomach and have acquired what seems more and more like one of those awful sinus infections that sap your energy and destroy all efforts at concentration.

Hence, my hitting the sack at 7:33 p.m., three minutes after my son, who is also sick and barfed all over his bed, which is kind of why I'm up right now.

I'm going to give myself a time limit here. I have to be back in bed, at least trying to sleep, by 1 a.m. Problem is, thngs are just pouring out of me the way I wish this infection would pour out. I can't seem to stop. Probably delirium. Great.

Yep, at 12:17 a.m., it's now official. I have become a booger/snot factory.

*Grabs tissue. Blows nose for the fourth time in the last 10 minutes. Little snow mountain building up between keyboard and monitor.*

Work sucks at the moment, which is odd because it hasn't sucked in quite a long time. I think it is because I'm sick and my best friend at work is away in New Zealand and there is her absence combined with the addition of a Jerk.

The Jerk is someone I've seen around for years and who now, during my illness, sits one aisle over from me. For some reason that escapes me, he has developed an instant dislike for me, or maybe it has been festering in him for a long psychotic eon. Who knows? All I know is that he directs enthusiastic, charming conversation at everyone around me but me, to whom he barely grunts an acknowledgment. Weird. I am always amazed at reporters who can so enthusiastically seek the truth in their stories and not leap to stupid conclusions but are unable to summon an iota of that trait in their regular interactions with other people. There, I feel a little better now.

I just coughed. I sound like Doc-frigging-Holliday when I cough. What the f**k is this anyway? I could summon geese in heat with this cough.

*Thinks the worst. Imagines opening paragraphs in respected medical journal. "The unfortunate Patient Zero in this pandemic succumbed to his illness while blogging in the wee hours, his symptoms eerily reminiscent to the super flu that annihilated most of humankind in Stephen King's 'The Stand.'"*

Another cough. Damn. I'm surprised I'm not waking half the neighborhood.

*end of transmission*

3-7-05 Distributed Computing Statistics-Part 2

SETI @ Home stats

Your credit:
Name (and URL)	Raven@the-Yahoo-SETI-Club-Team
Results Received	17939
Total CPU Time	9.120 years
Average CPU Time per work unit	4 hr 27 min 12.6 sec
Average results received per day	8.91
Last result returned:	Mon Mar 7 21:25:55 2005 UTC
Registered on:	Thu Sep 2 03:23:37 1999 UTC
	View Registration Class
SETI@home user for:	5.517 years
	View User Profile
Your group info:
You belong to the group named:	Yahoo SETI Club Team
You are not currently the founder of any teams.
Your rank: (based on current workunits received)
Your rank out of 5369153 total users is:	11276th place.
The number of users who have this rank:	1
You have completed more work units than	99.790% of our users

3-7-05 Three Things in Cleveland That Aren't a Joke...

...and are, in fact, world class facilities:

the Cleveland Museum of Art;

the Cleveland Clinic (ranked as one of the top four hospitals in the nation by U.S. News and World Report in 2004);

and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (my favorite place for a school field trip when I was a kid)...

World's oldest biped skeleton unearthed

Date: 15:13 07 March 2005; NewScientist.com news service; By Katharine Davis

The fossilised skeleton of a four million-year-old human ancestor able to walk on two legs could provide clues as to how humans' upright walk evolved. The remains, found in north-east Ethiopia, are the oldest yet discovered of an upright hominid, scientists told a press conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Saturday.

Several fossils from one individual have been discovered at the site, including parts of the ribs, vertebrae, pelvis, shoulder blade and thighbone. But it is the ankle joint that is most interesting, showing that it walked on two legs.

"This skeleton helps us to understand what happened in the joints, how walking upright occurred - what we never had before," says Bruce Latimer of the Natural History Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, who made the discovery together with Yohannes Haile Selassie of the National Museum in Addis Ababa.

Modern ankles

The discovery was made about 60 kilometres (37 miles) from where the fossilised remains of a hominid called Lucy were found in 1974. At about three million years old and with modern ankles, Lucy was the oldest example of a hominid able to walk upright discovered for many years. These newly discovered fossils are much older, and so may reveal more of the evolution process.

A study of a six million-year-old hominid thighbone in 2004 revealed walking habits closer to humans than chimpanzees, but scientists hope the ankle bone of the new find could reveal exactly how the as yet unclassified creature walked. "Normally, you find one bone or two from an individual and you are happy. Now we have found parts of a skeleton, this is very rare," adds Latimer.

Despite being older than Lucy, the skeleton is also bigger, with longer legs, which has surprised the scientists and remains unexplained. But they hope and expect that further work will reveal more of how humans evolved. "This is the world's oldest biped," says Latimer. "It will revolutionise the way we see human evolution."

3-4-05 Distributed Computing Statistics-Part 1

Climateprediction.net

Raven5655:

climateprediction.net member since	12 Feb 2005 17:39:13 UTC
Total credit	15028.28
equivalent HadSM3 Model-Years	99.39
Recent average credit	777.72
Team	Ars Technica - Team Baked Alaska

3-3-05 The King is Dead

I'm never happy when a key piece of my technology is about to become obsolete, but at least this time, I'm already on the cutting edge of the future.

The King is Dead, by which I mean the single core or single processor unit Pentium 4 in all of its A, B, C, Northwood, Prescott and 500 series chips.

In its place, sometime this year, Intel will bring out the new Pentium D and the Pentium Extreme Edition, both of which will have two computer processing units per core. With hyper-threading enabled, your operating system will recognize them as four processing units, two actual and two virtual.

Unless you are a total non geek or have been locked in a cave somewhere for the past ten years, you know that the Pentium 4 with hyper-threading split its processing power into two virtual units. Problem was, the Pentium 4 virtual dual processor even in its fastest iterations was never as fast as a true dual processor. Basically, you had one seriously cranked chip that was powerful enough to devote 50% of its power to two tasks. But, like I said, the gains this produced were minimal.

With hyper-threading turned off, my 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 'C' Northwood chip would process a typical SETI Classic work unit in well under three hours. But my dual processor Opteron computers were just as fast. Turn the hyper-threading on and the P4 behaved like a dual processor and was able to process two SETI Classic units, unlike any computer chip that came before it. But with half of its power spread between two work units, it's processing times slowed considerably to between 3 hrs 30 min.'s and 3 hrs. 50 minutes.

My Advanced Micro Devices Opterons--which are actual or real dual processor machines (yes, there are two CPUs lurking under the hood) blew away the P4 virtual set up. Not only that, the Opterons are Macroshaft Windoze operable 64-bit processors, meaning that they will work with Windows XP and any other Windows-based operating system, something that Intel still does not have in its stable.

So, as my gaming rig becomes toast in the coming months, going up against advanced dual core technology, I'm at least ahead of the curve in some respects. My dual Opteron 246 and 244 computers are the rough equivalent of having two AMD 64 3200+ and two AMD 64 3000+ chips each inside two computers. Meaning they will be able to compete with any 64-bit dual core processor machine. Moreover, the Opterons are ready for the next Windows operating system, the 64-bit Longhorn edition.

Besides, it's not exactly clear how much better a dual core processor will perform in an online multiplayer game situation. If I'm running some other program that is eating up a serious amount of clock cycles while also trying to frag someone on Far Cry or Half Life 2, I'll get creamed. Theoretically, the true dual chip could devote one processing core to the game and the other core to whatever else the computer had to work on, while my gaming rig game couldn't. But frankly, no one plays that way. I turn off everything that is not absolutely essential while I'm gaming.

But it's like I said some months ago, the days of the single core processors are numbered. Now, we'll see who puts the first dual on the market, AMD or Intel. This time, I'm betting on Intel. They are due.

AMD dual core link

Intel dual core link

Sony's, Toshiba's and IBM's STI Cell processor